Archive for the ‘Salvador’ Category

SOS Kitty (@GatinhosSOS) is a community initiative that cares for almost 200 street cats at Salvador’s beach side.

We are not an NGO, we’re a group of individuals from the area that invest our time and money to care for these animals. We struggle to help them survive, treat sickness and to ease their suffering. We feed them, make little shelters, clean, and do everything we can to make them comfortable. But we need a lot of help- financially and socially.

It’s common to let them reproduce and then poison the kittens. This needs to end! We need to cure them and spay them, and that requires money. A small donation can go a long way for us to buy food, sterile supplies for cleaning and treatment of wounds, and each cat can be spayed for only 10 dollars (just the price of anesthetics).

There is also a culture that needs to change. These cats are treated with the utmost disrespect, kittens are abandoned without their mothers, they are treated as a plague, so people shamelessly abandon, torture, and poison them regularly.

This mentality that values only the lives of pets with pedigree is also extremely violent. Sometimes the same people who spoil their certified pets are the ones who treat stray animals like garbage.

Many people in Brazil are busy enough caring for their own survival, we understand that. This is reflected on the amount of stray animals with no support, and no competent government to enforce a sustainable solution (that isn’t mass killing). We are the only solution.

The world is looking pretty grim. NPR and all critical podcasts I listen to are desperately trying to persuade people to run for office by saying you don’t need any special qualification (clearly…), you just need to know your community and have good intentions. As if that can remedy the murderous clown parade going on in there. I’m not convinced of this as a solution, but by all means knock yourself out.

The solution I’m trying is DIY community work. It’s impossible to do it alone, and we are far from having too many of these initiatives. But occasionally, a new obstacle pops up that makes me ask: what the fuck is the point?

Since the government isn’t providing basic resources to families in need, I thought I could do my part to provide what I can with the network I’ve got. Things like electricity and water.

Now I realize how valuable it is that my country, Brazil, a fossil fuel giant, partially subsidizes renewable energy initiatives like mine. This means that buying a Solar energy kit here is cheaper than buying its parts separately.

This is no longer the case in the United States, and it worries me that this might spill over to our side of the Americas- and severely jeopardize future initiatives like these. If people aren’t willing to pay Facebook 12 dollars to make it “add free”, then why would anyone pay 30% more for a charity? Money which will go straight back into the pockets of the State, an institution that already fails to provide what we need, and drain and disappear Goddesses know where.

I don’t mean to ask people to smuggle solar panels from China, but I’m ashamed to sound like a conservative by nagging about state taxes.

If anarchism is horizontalism and the political desire to abolish hierarchical systems of power, in what ways do the structures of power present in contemporary society influence our sexuality?

How can we then incorporate anarchy in our sexuality?

From the classical perspective, the main structure of power that anarchists want to abolish is the Government.

We can see that the Government is far-reaching enough to embrace sexuality, within ethics and religion.

Or, we can see that the Government is just one example among other oppressive structures of power to be abolished.

“Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals…”[6]

Not all anarchists agree in this area, and many who are not anarchists agree.

Either way, we want to be free, to be who we are, without oppression.

Sennett and Foucault

Since we want to abolish oppressive structures of power, we must talk about how to go from subjugation to POWER to the liberation of the BEING.

What is Power and what is Being? This is the area where existentialism and politics intersect.

Sennett, an NYU sociologist, talks about Foucault because he has the same interest in sexuality in relation to the concept of power and self-discovery. We have to deal with external powers to attain internal existential self-knowledge.

This text[1] explores the exploration of the theme of sexuality and solitude, starting from Foucault’s perspective on sexuality at the beginning of Christianity in Greece, to the solitude of modern life.

In other words, it is quite philosophical and abstract. And in my opinion: Euro/Phallocentric.

Sennett describes 3 types of Solitude. The victim, the rebel, and the different.

The victim and the rebel interact with an external power and dribbles with the subjugation to this power. In the contemporary solitary world, masturbation is confined to Christian ethics.

The different transcends power and practices auto-eroticism (one who excites himself).

This requires the liberation from Christian values, to reach a higher level of existential consciousness through sex. To transcend the external oppressive power and to meet yourself existentially.

Foucault and Hegel are probably the most famous existentialists who discuss the subject of Power and Being. In my opinion, the practice of their philosophy is very similar, only one is French and the other is German, so the tone of the texts is very different.

Foucault romanticizes this idea of transcending power. That’s why it works better with the theme of phallocentric sexuality. It’s a philosophical discussion that can be applied from intellectual autonomy.

(That French thing of smoking a cigarette with depth)

This is in contrast to Hegel, who many years earlier coldly describes a specific process of self-knowledge and recognition that is dependent on overcoming the fear of death.

That is why Hegel is best applied to the act of political revolution, which is not something we can achieve only with an intellectual practice.

So much so, that Marx used this basis to build a workable theory of the proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie.

I, with a less phallocentric perspective / as a woman, identify more with Hegel when I speak of sexuality because of this.

Sexual liberation is not something I can attain by self-knowledge alone, smoking a cigarette in bed. It’s something I must fight for and risk my survival to attain.

Hegel and Judith Butler

“Subordination is the price for existence”

“The necessary maintenance of the subject is subordination”

“The body is a socially constructed phenomenon”

“The subject’s options are to exist and to subordinate or resist and sacrifice their existence.”

[2]

Euro/Phallocentrism: BUTLER versus SENNETT

“Establishing a common ground” is an illusion: Solitude

Both speak of madness and loneliness.

“The less social relations are embedded in the flame of nature, of divine law, of organic necessity, most people would be able to imagine themselves with a life separate from their social roles.” (Sennett)

Sennett speaks of the European man’s perspective of what’s natural as a neutral perspective:

ALL REFERENCES ARE EUROPEAN MEN.

Sennett speaks of the phallocentrism of other writers but does not mention his own reproduction of the problem. One thing that Foucault also warned us about:

“Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area-European culture since the sixteenth century-one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. . . “[4] (italics added)

That is not for sure. For many women, sexuality is an imposition made by men who dare to make statements of this kind. We must be careful about hyper-sexualization because it’s used as an instrument of violence and oppression by the prevalent power structures.[5]

A less phallocentric perspective would be Butler:

“Gender is a social meaning that sex receives”.

So Butler speaks of sex, and Sennett speaks of the sexual act.

WE HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THE CONCLUSION OF THE TEXT TO READ ABOUT FEMININE MASTURBATION, AND IT’S A REFERENCE TO A MAN.

If we talk about sexual ethics and human sexuality and only refer to Christian European men, we should at least mention the problematic aspects of this act, and practice self-criticism when we reproduce this Euro/Phallocentrism. At least.